Abby Kelley came to Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1843 and turned the town upside down. Day after day she delivered passionate speeches against slavery and for women’s rights. She wasn’t …

Emily Greene Balch didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize for getting fired from Wellesley College, but it must have been a nice consolation prize. It was 1918 and Emily Greene …

On Jan. 6, 1773, an African-American slave named Felix delivered a written request to the Massachusetts General Court. In it, he asked to end slavery. Felix’s petition reflected the talk …

In 1832, a young widower named Horace Mann moved into a Boston boardinghouse where he met two intellectual schoolteachers from Salem, Mary and Elizabeth Peabody. They were sisters. Mary fell …

Many of her contemporaries considered Lucretia Mott the greatest woman of the 19th century. A Quaker minister shaped by her Nantucket upbringing, she didn’t compromise her abolitionist beliefs. She also …

Sarah Josepha Hale famously campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, but less well known are her stealth efforts to bring the Christmas tree into American living rooms. Puritan New …